Here you go Bostock...a little treat on Friday night to warm you up.
Posted on 01/14/2005 7:57:27 AM PST by madprof98
Woo hoo! I've made the big time. Last month, the website Free Republic featured a thread about my Nov. 18 column, "Queers Who Don't Act Right." You probably don't know much about Free Republic unless you are a right-wing lunatic. Free Republic is so far right that wing-nut gay muckraker Matt Drudge and Lucianne Goldberg, one of the architects of the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky brouhaha, both left the site in 1999 because it was too extreme, even for them.
In the years since, the site has become the contemporary version of a marathon meeting of the old John Birch Society and the KKK. Most recently, Free Republic was in the news when John Corsi, one of the Swift Boat Veterans who authored a book attacking John Kerry, turned out to post embarrassingly racist messages there. (Of course, he argued his racist insults were all "a joke." Talk about your Clintonian rhetoric.) The site also was in the news recently because someone correctly posted that Dan Rather had relied on phony documents to impute President Bush's National Guard service.
Free Republic is so extreme that it's a blast to read. Don't bother to explore the site with the idea of posting an alternative perspective or to correct facts. Your post will simply be deleted, despite its owner's celebration of freedom of speech. The site has no hesitation in reprinting copyrighted material, like my column, even though the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times both successfully sued to stop such theft. In other words, as is generally true of the lunatic far right, the truth, free speech and the law only matter when they support their point of view.
Of course, Freepers, as the creepy wing-nuts on the site are called, were not alone in being outraged by my column. I received quite a lot of mail, mainly from other gay people, questioning my argument that LA Fitness at Ansley Mall overreacted when it closed its sauna because of some occasional sex and reopened it with a new picture window overlooking the locker room. As an update, I might add that the window has effectively eliminated unseen sexual interactions inside the sauna and made room for another, more open form of sex between people on either side of the window: exhibitionism and voyeurism.
Most of my correspondents argued that the occasional discovery of sex in the sauna merited involvement by the police and the health department, reconstruction of the sauna and a report by one of the local TV stations. And, as usual, they concluded that because I called that overreacting, I must favor sex in public spaces. No matter that I said I find the behavior annoying. To be righteous, I must find it -- what? -- criminally actionable.
I wasn't surprised by the reaction. Sex troubles people more than anything. That's why Clinton was impeached for lying about a blowjob, while Bush was re-elected despite lying about a war that has killed thousands. Gay people's oppression is the result of their sex lives, so it's not surprising that they are hypersensitive to anything that might add to the picture of deviance. But it has become obvious that the very effort to make all deviance disappear and to assimilate -- to marry, for example -- increases prejudice.
The Freepers, of course, took outrage over my column to dizzy heights, fabricating arguments I did not make. This began with the man who posted it, "madpro98." He said that I dismissed "all sexual conventions, including common decency, as so much homophobia." Actually, I wrote no such thing. Then, of course, the Freepers concluded that the case of LA Fitness means every gay man is a sauna whore. For example, "Sender" writes: "Does anyone else think it's strange that gay men often have sex in a public toilet stall? ... Even if we had unisex public restrooms, somehow I can't imagine a man and a woman eyeing one another while washing their hands, then just jumping in the stall for a go."
The writer obviously has never been to Buckhead on a Saturday night. But what cracks me up is that the Freepers are so anxious to bash someone like me that they don't even realize when they are supporting a contrary argument. For example, "buffyt" quoted my statement that I don't like "stumbling upon any sex scene to which I have not been invited." Then she riffed obsessively about heterosexual couples at Mardi Gras "coupling all over the place" while the police ignore them. Exactly. Heterosexuals spoil the view with public sexual interactions every bit as much as homosexuals, arguably more, when they can find a place to do it. Nobody followed up on that post, of course.
I'm not going to quote the mind-boggling illogics and endless sophomoric fag-bashing (despite arguing they aren't homophobic). But I will thank "Jack Black," who wrote: "I think this was very well written. He is writing for the audience of radical homosexuals as one, so I have trouble twisting my thoughts enough to get to his point of view, but I still think the writing is good." Kiss me, dude!
Cliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology. Write him at cliff.bostock@ creativeloafing.com.
*wincing*
Lol!
Welcome!
I know you didn't ask me but Social Security was a huge mistake. As it is, it's a pyramid scheme with a negative return on your investment (if you count inflation) with the added bonus that you are forced by law to stay in. And even at that, it's headed for insolvency. Raising taxes or retirement ages is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We should make economics and personal finances a mandatory part of any school curriculum from a very early age and then Social Security will no longer even be necessary. (Not that it ever was...)
Anybody else notice that these people talk and write just to impress themselves. Anyone got any idea what the hell this means?
I think he's trying to say that dirt has a soul.
"Ecopsychology?"
Wow. Just wow.
I want to be a Gay Nazi for Christ!
82nd isn't "Screaming Eagles". That's the 101st Air Assault (no longer Airborne)...
"What the hell is "depth psycology"?!"
Pseudo psychology.
Here you go Bostock...a little treat on Friday night to warm you up.
Where's the brown stain?
Dissolved in a cup of hot water in a San Francisco cafe.
These "Academics" are dead set nutcases whose collective wisdom would not illuminate a 5 watt lightbulb.
You mean, like "Bob Wallace?"
Ooops, am I allowed to say that name?
These are the fine folks who confuse cleverness with wisdom. You can have the highest IQ in the world, but it's not merely useless but destructive without wisdom, like a giant fast ship fully loaded with LNG without a rudder.
They really beleive that having a high IQ does not confer wisdom upon you. But it only means you have the capacity to be an even bigger fool.
Proof that a college degree does not make one smart. What a waste of space this guy is!
Correction: They really believe having a high IQ really DOES automatically confer wisdom on you...
It looks to me as if it's a course of study in earning a "Doctorate of Touchy-Feelyness".
Or a way to waste $50,000 of your parent's money going to college to learn to be a Swami.
Free Speech means having the right to set up your own website and freely associate with those you choose without the gubmint tossing you in the pokey.
The author, like spoiled children in general and retarded liberal Phds specifically, believe free speech means everyone else is obligated to provide them, free, a soapbox to regurgitate every single idiotic and filthy idea that creaps into their pot shriveled brains.
lol
Pray for W and Our Troops
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